The Complete Cosmicomics (Penguin Modern Classics)

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One August afternoon in 1982, I drove to Calvino’s summer house—a modern, roomy villa in a secluded residential complex at Roccamare on the Tuscan sea coast north of Grosseto. After exchanging greetings, we settled down in big comfortable chairs on the broad shaded terrace. The sea was not visible, but you could sense it through the pungent, pine-scented air. In ognuno degli eventi è stato al centro dell’azione, trasformato magari in una forma di vita diversa dalla specie umana: prima un punto, poi un pesce, poi un dinosauro, o una forma di vita non ancora ben definita, in continua evoluzione. Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’ boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures.

His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales ( Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation ( Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: " My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."JF: You are the director of Spicy Fish Cultural Production Ltd. Can you introduce Spicy Fish’s mission and some of your projects? The Form of Space: As the unnamed narrator "falls" through space, he cannot help but notice that his trajectory is parallel to that of a beautiful woman, Ursula H'x, and that of lieutenant Fenimore, who is also in love with Ursula. The narrator dreams of the shape of space changing, so that he may touch Ursula (or fight with Fenimore). JF: I’ve really enjoyed reading the features in Fleurs des lettres. One that stands out to me is “Toward a Cantophone Literature.” In my work as a translator of Hong Kong literature, I’ve encountered more and more writers, especially younger writers, who incorporate Cantonese into their work, as opposed to only writing in standard written Chinese. For example, I’ve been translating work by the post-1990s writer Wong Yi, both her short stories and her libretto for the Cantonese chamber opera Women Like Us. Wong Yi uses standard written Chinese for her exposition but switches to Cantonese for dialogue or when writing her characters’ inner thoughts. In this way, she reduces the gap between the written and spoken language, with her dialogue reflecting how Hong Kong Cantonese speakers actually talk. Wong Yi’s recent Cantonese chamber opera libretto (music composed by Daniel Lo), Women Like Us, was adapted from two of Xi Xi’s short stories “A Woman Like Me” and “The Cold.” In translating the surtitles for the opera, I found myself not only rereading Xi Xi’s stories but also falling down numerous rabbit holes related to the multiple intertextual references Xi Xi makes in both works. Wong Yi’s libretto inscribes new meanings onto these stories, changing the characters’ fates. In her forthcoming short fiction collection Ways to Love in a Crowded City, Wong Yi also rewrites “The Cold” as a short story set in the present day, updating Xi Xi’s tragic love story for the twenty-first century—for example, whereas Xi Xi’s story alludes to classical Chinese poetry, Wong Yi’s adaptation cites contemporary Cantonese pop songs.

LL: I am working on a funded translation project called “The Ark,” which involves crafting book proposals and translation samples for a selection of Hong Kong literature to be pitched in the international book market. While this is a common practice in the world publishing industry, it is absent in Hong Kong because the conversation between publishers and literary scouts has long been lost and the costs for funding translations are too high. Hong Kong is very different from Taiwan, which is the main conduit between the traditional Chinese market and the rest of the world. Taiwanese literary agents have solid connections with foreign publishers and agents, facilitating the promotion of Taiwanese authors to the international book market, while I have to work from scratch to approach publishers and agents. Well, we have ‘ old Qfwfq’ as our narrator of the stories. And what is ‘ Qfwfq’? I don’t know and looks like Calvino also never decided what is ‘ Qfwfq’. But collecting from the stories, he is some kind of anthropomorphized shape-shifter. He is dinosaur in one story and mollusc in another. And he has been there even before universe came into existence. Calvino was born in Cuba and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45.The Cosmicomics tell the story of the history of the universe, from the big bang, through millennia and across galaxies. It is witnessed through the eyes of 'cosmic know-it-all' Qfwfq, an exuberant, chameleon-like figure, who takes the shape of a dinosaur, a mollusc, a steamer captain and a moon milk gatherer, among others. This is the first complete edition in English of Italo Calvino's funny, whimsical and delightful stories, which blend scientific fact, flights of fancy, parody and wordplay to show the strangeness and the wonders of the world. The Distance of the Moon: The first and probably the best known story. Calvino takes the fact that the Moon used to be much closer to the Earth, and builds a story about a love triangle among people who used to jump between the Earth and the Moon, in which lovers drift apart as the Moon recedes. Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen.

Have you started realising the strangeness of this book! But the real deal of ‘being strange’ begins with the stories.LL: You mentioned Xi Xi, who is one of Hong Kong’s most prominent authors. The entire July 2019 special issue of Fleurs des lettres was devoted to her, celebrating her sixty years of writing. Her style has inspired many generations of Hong Kong authors, forming a body of work that is allegorical and fantastical and displays a keen observation of ordinary life in Hong Kong. So, there we are, given perfectly conflicting instructions. Perhaps if we could follow them we might arrive somewhere near the condition of "negative capability" which Keats believed the most fruitful of all. I have a notion that Italo Calvino lived a good part of the time there. A Sign in Space": The idea that the galaxy slowly revolves becomes a story about a being who is desperate to leave behind some unique sign of his existence. This story also is a direct illustration of one of the tenets of postmodern theory—that the sign is not the thing it signifies, nor can one claim to fully or properly describe a thing or an idea with a word or other symbol. Italo Calvino's enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures, The Complete Cosmicomics is translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver in Penguin Modern Classics. As unlikely as it may seem, Ian McEwan’s new novel Nutshell is narrated by a foetus. “So here I am, upside down in a woman,” reads the first line. “Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in, what I’m in for.” It’s a completely bonkers conceit, or, as McEwan himself put it in a recent interview with the Guardian, an idea “so silly that I just couldn’t resist it.”

A little-known third collection – La memoria del mondo e altre storie cosmicomiche ("World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories") (1968), a volume not available commercially in Italy – offered 20 fictions in all, 12 from the previous two collections [ Cosmicomics and t zero] and eight new pieces (seven of these new items are translated here for the first time into English; the other new 1968 tale, the title story, was translated by Tim Parks as "World Memory" in the 1992 volume Numbers in the Dark). References [ edit ] Our conversation took place over the course of five days in the summer of 1998 in the garden of her house in the south of France. We talked over champagne, by the side of a swimming pool rather like the one in her short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes.” As the hot day cooled into evening, our conversations had the feeling of relaxation on both sides. Dame Antonia spent the days working on The Biographer’s Tale, and I submitted to the rigor of cycling in solitude up the ferocious mountains that surround her house. One day, we took a day off and drove to Nimes, that beautiful Roman city: Dame Antonia’s pleasures—they seemed equal—in the dazzling glass palace of the Carré d’Art, old bullfighting posters, a ravishing Matisse nude in pencil, and a superlatively delicious lunch at that great temple of the art nouveau, the Hôtel Imperator Concorde, were contagious. Both of us, I think, enjoyed the conversations, however, as a break from more arduous activities, and although the interviewer should always try to keep the conversation to the point, it was not always easy to resist a feeling of delight as Dame Antonia moved onto evolutionary theory, non-conformism, F. R. Leavis, and dozens of other topics with a sure, swift movement of thought. There are few writers so rich in intellectual curiosity; none, perhaps, who so definitely regards the life of the mind as a matter of pleasure taken and given in equal measure. Much of the novel’s dialogue is written in Cantonese, but one of the protagonists insists on speaking Mandarin all the time, even though she struggles with it. The character’s shoddy grasp of the language is reflected through dialogue written in a non-standard Mandarin that’s slightly off. These linguistic shifts are fascinating from a reader’s perspective, but from a translator’s viewpoint, I have to come up with creative ways to reflect this juxtaposition in English. Esposito, Scott. The Complete Cosmicomics: Full Contents and Details. The Quarterly Conversation, 2009.Forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm” after pondering for million of years to answer the “ultimate question to life, the universe and everything”. As a crew-member of Expedition 42 on the International Space Station, I made sure that this was in my essential luggage. It provided two important reminders for space travellers. First, don’t panic! Second, let’s not take ourselves too seriously. In the first of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, devoted to the virtue of lightness, Calvino wrote: “Lightness for me is related to precision and definition, not to the hazy and haphazard.” Paul Valéry said: ‘One must be light like the bird, not like the feather.’” That’s the essence of the Cosmicomics. These short stories are a dizzying journey of the imagination, witty, light-hearted, endearing and yet clearly inspired by scientific theories and coherent with their basic premises. Her novels are Shadow of a Sun(1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sunin 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance(1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale(2000). The novels The Virgin in the Garden(1978), Still Life(1985), and Babel Tower(1996) form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Womanin 2002. Her shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories(1987), Angels and Insects(1992), The Matisse Stories(1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye(1994), and Elementals(1998). All these are much translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the anthology’s modest omission of its editor’s own stories, as she is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE (commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999. Delirium? . . . Let’s assume I answer, I am always rational. Whatever I say or write, everything is subject to reason, clarity, and logic. What would you think of me? You’d think I’m completely blind when it comes to myself, a sort of paranoiac. If on the other hand I were to answer, Oh, yes, I am really delirious; I always write as if I were in a trance, I don’t know how I write such crazy things, you’d think me a fake, playing a not-too-credible character. Maybe the question we should start from is what of myself do I put into what I write. My answer—I put my reason, my will, my taste, the culture I belong to, but at the same time I cannot control, shall we say, my neurosis or what we could call delirium.